Nice Boost in Ann Arbor — Will It Last?

by bcarr on August 17, 2009

Lots of inside-the-news- buzz about the Ann Arbor News‘ move to online has paid off with a significant boost to its online numbers in July.

Compete.com is reporting the average monthly number of indivuduals that went to the site increased more than 1500% in July 2009, from 4,000 in June to 57,000 in July. The only problem is we’ve seen this before, when the attention was on the Rocky Mountain News closing and its spinoff, I Want My Rocky.

As the chart shows, we see a very similar spike the first month, followed by a hard crash and no revival.

But it looks like AnnArbor and publisher Laurel Rogers are off to a much better start — they already have 10,300 pages indexed by Google (and not legacy pages either) compared to just 1,300 for the Rocky, which has been at it for five more months. Ofcourse, Ann Arbor is just a LiveJournal blog trying to support a staff of 54 people, inexplicably including two adminsitrative assistants, so not sure it will be at all profitable.

My prediction is for a settling in at 7,500 to 10,000 unique visitors in August. We’ll see.